I was reading an article in Wired News entitled "When Play Money Becomes Real", about the virtual economies created by Internet-based multi-player games. Since writing some initial thoughts on music, file sharing, and money, I've been thinking more about this and will share some further musings.

There were two important developments that brought about music file sharing: the development of the mp3 compression algorithm, which allowed audio files to be compressed to about 10% of their raw size, and the development of The Napster file sharing application. The desire to share files was already there, it just couldn't happen on a large scale without these tools. Now perhaps we are seeing the same development in the monetary arena: the development of an exchange system which is outside the normal banking system. And as was the case with file sharing and the music industry, this alternate system will catch the established status quo power structure by surprise. As the Wired article notes, this is not even on most people's radar. I personally did not know about it until today.2004-04-16, door Inne ten Have

The next 25 years of information technology will blur boundaries between previously well-formed and discrete concepts, entities, or states of being. For example, work and play, nation and individual, rich and poor will be interpreted differently, with more overlaps than differences because of the porous nature of "being digital." A fully interconnected world with a common language is a very different place than one delimited by distance and Newtonian physics. Without question, the generation of kids born a quarter of a century hence will have totally different views about some of the most basic tenets of society, from love and family to business and pleasure. Of these basic elements, I have chosen to focus on one: money. How will transactions change over the next 25 years? Perhaps surprisingly.

Cattle are widely considered the oldest form of money, used over 10,000 years ago to make payments and to account for debts and credits. The inherent value was in the cow itself. Only much later, after the Stone Age, did currency emerge in which its worth was established by convention and trust, using objects like shells and shell imitations. Modern coinage and paper money can be traced to China 500 B.C. and 100 B.C., using metal and leather, respectively. Paper banknotes emerged at the end of the 17th century as a promise to pay the bearer a sum on demand. These were handwritten and signed by cashiers. Only in the middle of the 18th century did printed, fixed denominations start to appear. It then took another 100 years for fully printed notes to emerge without need for filling in the name of the payee and signing each one individually. We call this stuff cash.

Today, cash has been replaced increasingly by electronic credit and debit. In excess of three trillion dollars is moved around the planet daily. Conversions occur, accounts are changed, addressers and addressees are modified. But no money moves in the sense of coins or pigs going from my pocket or pen to yours. Everything is a scheme of pointers. The bits used to achieve such accounting don't have value unto themselves. They're only the means.

Some people, including myself, believe the next step is for some of those bits to have value. That is to say, consider a string of bits to be like a virtual cow or shell. In order to distinguish these bits (like telling the difference between a beautiful seashell and a piece of coal), they would need an agreed identity. To avoid forgery, they would need a unique and secure ID. And to stop multiple spending of the same bits, there would need to be a clearing process or a means to reveal the identity of anybody who tries to double-spend. All of these requirements are easily achieved in both traceable and anonymous systems of E-cash. In these cases, the money does move. The bits are money. The more you have, the richer you are. This is the future, though maybe only in part.

A parallel and more intriguing form of trade in the future will be barter. Swapping is a very attractive form of exchange because each party uses a devalued currency, in some cases one that would otherwise be wasted. Many of us are too embarrassed to run yard sales or too lazy to suffer the inconvenience and indignity of eBay. But imagine if you weren't. The unused things in your basement can be converted into something you need or want. Likewise, the person with whom you're swapping is giving something of value to you which is less so to them. With minimal computation, three-way, four-way, and n-way swaps can emerge, thereby removing the need for any common currency.2004-10-18, door Inne ten Have

Open Source Currency

Or, how mobile phones can break the money monopoly.

In the midst of discussing wireless data business plans, cell phone technology developments, and the moment-to-moment success of the mobile media industry, it's sometimes easy to forget the bigger picture. Just as early Internet enthusiasts seemed to focus on ad banners and animated GIFs instead of what turned out to be the much more momentous power of blogs to influence the direction of culture, those of us covering mobile data may have also taken our eyes off the bigger prizes in store for this new medium.

It's easy to talk about how handheld, networked computers (that's what our cell phones are, after all) promote the decentralization of content creation, file exchange and even culture -- but what about the stuff that's so centralized we stop thinking about it as even up for discussion? That's right: I'm talking about money.

The gold standard of sterling is long forgotten and now the supremacy of the greenback has been surpassed. The world has a new global currency - airline frequent flyer miles, which have a greater total value than dollars, euros, pounds or yen.

Doled out by airlines to seasoned travellers, they are intended to be redeemed for tickets as a reward for loyalty. But since their invention in 1981, their popularity has spawned its own economy of trading schemes, charitable donations, enthusiasts and scams.

By the end of 2004, almost 14 trillion frequent flyer miles had been accumulated worldwide, worth between 1p and 6p apiece.

According to a new analysis by The Economist magazine, the global stock is worth more than $700bn (£370bn), more than all the US dollar bills in circulation, and streets ahead of Britain's £42bn of notes and coins

More precisely, money is the tangible manifestation of an agreement between you and other people that the oddly-colored piece of paper in your hands has value. This lets currency rates slip and slide relative to each other, as people try to agree on exactly what the value should be, but it also has another implication. If you can find enough people to agree on its value, you can make up your own money.

In 1998, the residents of the Palmeira District, a slum in Fortaleza, Brazil, did just that. Setting up an organization called Association of Neighbours of the District of Palmeira, the residents created a new bank -- the Bancos des Palmas, or Palm Bank -- and a new currency, the Palmas. The bank and currency not only succeeded, they have thrived.
2005-02-24, door Inne ten Have

There's a growing movement afoot to have alternative money systems, or "complementary currencies", as they're called. The people involved are not cranks or tax-evasionists, they include people like Bernard Lietaer (called "the father of the Euro" by some, and in 1991 named the best currency dealer in the world by Business Week). We've mentioned local currencies before, and there are many great resources, link lists, and in-depth articles elsewhere. More recently, Lietaer did an interview with Ode magazine, and at last spring's Doors of Perception conference I saw Margrit Kennedy talk, who has basically all of her presentations and papers online.

Instead of a plastic card for a bank, we could have a plastic card with a bank. The stone-pillared edifices that used to house banks are full of nightclubs and gyms now; people bank electronically, they use ATMs. An ATM is merely a device to spit paper. Why not make every card an ATM? Tomorrow's microchips won't lack for capacity. A cell phone is like yesterday's switching station, a laptop is yesterday's supercomputer. Why settle for a bank account when you could buy a cheap bank-on-a-chip?

A new Web site allows you to borrow money from strangers in cyberspace. It may even free you from credit card debt and the usurers at the local payday loan center.

The middle-aged woman in Janesville, Wis., who recently posted a request for $5,000 on Prosper.com, an online marketplace for personal loans, chose a screen name that elegantly distills her station in life. BusyLady52 is indeed a busy lady. By day, she works for the county in an office job; at night, she's a dispatcher for the city bus line. In addition, she cares for her aging and ailing parents and a younger sister who suffered a debilitating brain injury in 1987. Yet all this work has brought neither security nor much satisfaction, and BusyLady52 now strives to crawl out from under a lifetime of debt.

Who is allowed to issue money in the United States? The founding fathers made it clear that the power to create money would not be taken lightly. Their experiences with money and inflation during the Revolutionary War made them wary of paper money and conscious of the power wielded by those authorized to create it. They gave Congress the right to issue money and forbade the states from doing so. But the federal government isn’t the only entity that has, in practice, issued money. Private citizens and private companies have, too.

In the 1800s, for example, much of the country’s paper currency consisted of notes issued by private banks. Nowadays, commercial banks don’t print their own notes, but they create money just the same—in the form of checking accounts. People and companies other than banks have also occasionally seen the need to create their own forms of money.

Private money—money issued by individuals or companies—can be seen as an innovation that arises to fill a void left by the federally provided money of the day. Studying various examples of private money that have arisen throughout U.S. history has taught economists much about the qualities money must have to be useful. In this Commentary, we describe some of the needs private money has arisen to fill and some of the problems people have encountered when making or using private money. We consider the lessons our experiences with private money imply for our money today and in the future.